A Conversation With Jay Newton-Small

Feb. 5, 2016

Media Outlet: the Huffington Post

Growing up all over the place, I spent a lot of times in museums and I thought I was going to be an art historian, or a curator of a museum, so I studied art history in college. And then over a summer I interned at an auction house and I was completely disillusioned. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life sucking up to rich people, so I decided against art history. I ended up going with a friend to see a guy speak, an executive producer of Dateline NBC. I went to Tufts undergraduate and he also was a Tufts alum and he talked a lot about how journalism was the art of the curious. And I was like “Well, I am a curious person,” and I kind of like seeing things for myself. I ended up going to work for him for a year and then I went to graduate school at Columbia, because I had not really done much journalism beforehand and so that’s where I kind of really learned to be a journalist.